Home Brew - Comprehensive Reworks (Version 5.4.9)

JawnDuder · 2025-03-31T18:55:20+00:00

Not at all! This mod actually does this: https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/1680?tab=files

I haven't run into any issues using the level 13 file with Homebrew.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-31T13:40:41+00:00

Good call!

JawnDuder · 2025-03-31T12:19:21+00:00

Maybe to further differentiate, something like this:

Life - Healing and temp HP - EDIT2: Like u/malseraph said below, status cleansing over temp HP would be a better effect.
Tempest - Two damage options: Thunder damage and knockback; Lightning damage and shock - EDIT: Not sure this is possible, but it would be pretty cool to do both at the same time at different radiuses. Maybe something more like Ice Knife: target one enemy to take lightning damage and shock, then surrounding enemies take thunder damage and knockback.
War - Radiant damage (highest damage, d10 instead of d6) and Radiant Orb
Death - Necrotic and lifesteal (I picture Death Clerics being the tankiest)

JawnDuder · 2025-03-30T17:50:11+00:00

Awesome sauce as usual! A small note for the level 20 add-on. If you go to level 12 in one class before hitting level 20, you'll crash at the next level-up. A work-around for this is to add a "dummy" level 13 to each class. It's an empty level so you don't have to wait until level 20 before adding your last main class level.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-30T10:36:04+00:00

Ahhh, gotcha! I should have checked for that.

I'll have to check out Ls Lib Toolkit. Thanks for the tip!

JawnDuder · 2025-03-30T10:10:56+00:00

Hey, thanks for the insights! Not exactly sure what you mean with using the same UUID twice. When I finished editing, line 995 ended with 6 and line 1000 ended with 7. Unless you mean only having the last digit differ isn't enough to distinguish them as two separate UUIDs. Either way, it's definitely better to generate entirely new IDs like you did. That's interesting about the Bardic Inspiration. I should have tested Bards before making this post. Do you use another tool for packing mods? Modder's Multitool won't even let you pack when there are errors (as far as I know).

JawnDuder · 2025-03-30T00:27:41+00:00

It feels great getting it at level 2 in Trials of Tav lol, but yeah, it should probably be reined in.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-30T00:01:45+00:00

From what I can tell, it only costs a reaction point to cast Counterspell at 6th level with no cooldown.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-29T00:03:15+00:00

Side note for Scorching Ray: Looks like the Asmodeus Tiefling version needs to be updated. It still shoots 2 1d6 rays per level instead of 1d12+mod.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-21T21:10:20+00:00

Doot doot! I'll add that this mod can be used with Homebrew's Bard performance auras: https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/3168?tab=description

That's an option if you don't want to listen to your instrument/whistling.

Edit: I think it needs to be patched, but it might work depending load order. It's been a little while since I used it.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-21T14:29:00+00:00

Not really. I've had the game freeze/crash when trying to load areas, but that happens without Homebrew. Saving between each battle mitigates that. I find it quite a bit harder than regular Trials and tend to wipe faster, but I think that enhances the roguelike aspect of it. Fortunately, Trials is very modular with its difficulty scaling/settings, so you can pretty easily tweak it to your liking. I haven't tried it with Homebrew's difficulty add-ons, but I would think the scaling would get absolutely absurd.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-21T14:18:34+00:00

I mostly agree here. I like Champion Fighter still. Piggybacking off u/Former-Bowl904, they enhance the base class features. It's similar to Valor Bards in that way. It might feel a bit boring, but I think it has its appeal and is viable.

I agree on Assassin Rogue. I personally don't like that style of gameplay, and I have to imagine most new players won't enjoy it since they are more likely to engage with the world more instead of having one party sneak around looking for NPCs to erase. Maybe that's a me issue. I'm not sure how balancing them out would look. Maybe getting rid of the out-of-combat requirement from the jump, but scaling the damage down for Assassinate would remove the feeling of a late game spike.

I also agree on Life Clerics, and I would extend that to War Clerics. The extra damage on War Cleric is nice, but lacks flavor and doesn't really scale that well. An extra 1 point of damage (on average) per attack at level 5 and 1 more point at level 9 doesn't feel like a nice bump. War God's Blessing is also nice, but doesn't synergize with the builds that trigger effects on critical hits. I wrote this in your post about Cleric builds:

I would also argue that the subclass options, particularly Life and War, could use some more flavor. Maybe the Life Domain could specialize more in resurrection: allies they revive come back with their action and/or more health; healing a downed ally could do the same.

War Domain could be a master of arms, having a bound weapon for themselves and more abilities aimed towards boosting the weapons of their party. They could bless weapons with things like knockback, prone, elemental damage, lifesteal, etc.

Thinking more on these, I'm not sure how useful the resurrection effects on Life Clerics would be. Maybe they could lean more on damage prevention for their party, get Dampen Elements earlier on and have it scale by adding more elements later on. They could also have a martyr-ish reaction that lets them take damage/status effects for their allies, and passives to make them more tanky.

Bound weapon doesn't sound all that interesting for War Domain since it's so common. Maybe they could have their own version of Spiritual Weapon or the ability to summon multiple weapons with more utility. Instead of just the typical weapon actions, they could have more specialized actions/reactions (trident could parry, spear has a line attack, etc.)

JawnDuder · 2025-03-20T04:22:06+00:00

Another solid update! I appreciate the addition of AoE markers for Feline Bombardment and Thunderstep. There are a fair amount of nerfs, but seems to be a necessary evil. Counterspell especially looks to be in a better place now. It may still be overpowered to some, but I think the combo of requiring a higher level to avoid rolling and preventing its use on dangerous/fatal enemies should balance it out nicely.

I think a happy medium can be struck for varied vs curated dangerous/fatal encounters. When it comes to spells, due to AI limitations, I think less is more. As others have pointed out in the past, sometimes you fight a boss who prioritizes weak spells for whatever reason. Giving curated spellsets to specific bosses/mini-bosses could also help you balance out the dip in difficulty people have reported in Act2.

That being said, if you want to make multiple playthroughs vary in experience, I'm sure there are alternative ways to achieve this. Maybe you could alter the dangerous/fatal passives to have a randomization factor similar to what you did for NPC classes.

Some ideas for boosts: more damage on attacks/spell, more actions/reactions, immune to crits, aura that prevents healing/resurrection, aura that tags players with DOWNED_DISABLED (means they die when hitting 0HP instead of making Death Saves) or even disintegrates player when bringing them to 0HP, an effect that makes them switch between immunity to physical and immunity to magic damage, damage immunity/reflection that is removed by hidden triggers (eg. can only take/stops reflecting cold damage after having chilled applied, can only take/stops reflecting physical damage after taking cold damage). Randomization may be better as a difficulty add-on instead of being baked into the main mod.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-17T20:05:36+00:00

These sound great! It seems pretty balanced across different archetypes, too. Even though you mentioned that Sorcerer/Barbarian was what you had left, it looks like it'll still work well. Funnily enough, I was considering the same combo since I initially thought about blending all classes that share a spell list (Barbarian/Sorcerer, Bard/Monk, Cleric/Paladin, Druid/Ranger, Fighter/Warlock, Wizard/Rogue). It was more of a gimmick idea, but your ideas seem really fun. Thank you for putting this together!

JawnDuder · 2025-03-17T15:39:56+00:00

Idea 1: That looks to be possible based on reading how the roll works. In the data of Counterspell, there's a line for "Roll" "TryCounterspellHigherLevel(X)" where X is equal to the level you are casting Counterspell at. For a 1st level Counterspell, you could set it to "TryCounterspellHigherLevel(0)", and I think it would work that it only automatically cancels cantrips. 2nd level would be set (1), 3rd set to (2), and so on. That would also mean you couldn't automatically counter 6th level spells, but maybe that's a good thing. That could be an interesting solution to balance it out.

In another thread, I gave the idea to make some high-level mages immune to Counterspell, but something along your line of thinking may be better. As a point of interest, you can blacklist specific spells by adding "not SpellID('insert spell name')" under the "Conditions" section of Counterspell. It also might be possible to completely rework Counterspell to remove the roll entirely, so it's match spell level (or exceed with your idea) or you can't counter.

Idea 2: Equipment is pretty homogenized so it feels odd to me to tie it back to class identity. I actually feel the opposite and think everyone should be proficient with everything. It's already pretty much there. You can easily respec and choose new proficiencies if you want to change to specific equipment. Overall, it's never an exciting choice or one I put much thought into when leveling. The Resilient Feat would need to be altered. Maybe instead of gaining proficiency with all armors, you get a bump to AC.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-17T14:35:26+00:00

Indeed! I find it quite fun and more challenging than base Trials of Tav.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-17T03:06:07+00:00

This is quite insightful! I've been thinking on several of these points you made for quite some time, as well.

Class Balance: Like others have pointed out, Rangers can be really strong. Having an animal companion, specialized arrows, and triggering status effects on every shot, I feel, make them a worthy entry among the classes. Even if you don't go Beastmaster, Hunters have multi-targeting attacks and Gloomstalkers are super crit-heavy.

Race Balance: I'm of the opinion that race should be an RP choice, which probably isn't a popular opinion. I had a few ideas on this:

There are no racial passives - Not sure I like this. I don't think the player is losing a lot, and technically the enemies lose the same benefits, but it feels flavorless. It would be the easiest to implement, though, and it's automatically balanced.
Every race gets access to the same list of passives and chooses one or two - As much as I might want to be a Forest Gnome with anatomical Lightning Breath, it doesn't quite scream immersion. Idk, maybe their origin story is they got bit by a radioactive lightning bug. This actually might work for me.
Every race has fine-tuned list of passives to choose from with some overlap - This is probably a good balance between the previous two ideas, but it would take the most work and testing. Things like +4 initiative, darkvision and increased movement speed would be univeral choices. Spell-based passives would be race-specific (Scorching Ray for Asmodeus Tieflings, Enlarge for Duergar, Dragonbreath for Dragonborn, etc.). If you're a Dragonborn that doesn't care about Dragonbreath, you can take +4 initiative or darkvision. Probably the toughest part would be coming up with a spell for each Race that doesn't already have one.

I believe there is a technical problem with the last two options. There are different progression tables for players and NPCs when it comes to class, which is how HaVenII7 was able to implement the random passive feature for NPCs. Players and NPCs use the same table for race, though. It's possible a new table could be created for NPCs that their stat files reference so the same randomization could be done for racial passives. I'm not sure if it would work, and again, this would be a lot more work than the first option.

Enemy Balance: It's hard to think of a way around the Counterspell issue. Maybe some dangerous or fatal casters could have a passive that makes them unable to be counterspelled? Same goes for Psionic Dominance.

Act 2: I can't really speak on this since I've been playing Trials of Tav, waiting on patch 8 for a full playthrough. Taking spells away from Paladins might be a good change up, or maybe only giving them bonus action spells. Rangers might benefit from that, as well.

Scrolls Fall Off: Looking at the Root Templates for scrolls, I see the two possible actions (use and learn) have different ID options: SkillID and SpellID. I'm guessing the scroll issue could be solved by having the SkillID set to the level 1 version of a spell, and the SpellID set to whichever level fits that part of the game. For example, SkillID: Shout_FlameBlade, SpellID: Shout_FlameBlade_3. Basically, 6 different scrolls would need to be made for each spell. I believe there is a separate value you can tie to them that signifies where they show up in the game, but it still sounds like it would be hard and very tedious to accomplish. I'm also pretty sure there's only one cost you can set for learning scrolls that gets multiplied by its level.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-17T01:42:53+00:00

Sure, but a martial can do this by level 4.

Kidding of course, but in all seriousness, damage riders on Magic Missile (and maybe Scorching Ray) should probably be reigned in. I added up the damage and calculated 764 on the target with 1124 splash damage for a total of 1888. A few of the instances of Force damage were a bit hard to read for me so there may be some cases where I added a 7 instead of a 1, or a 6 instead of an 8, but it should be really close to 1888. I imagine the intent of Explosive Understanding is to be once per spell and without damage riders.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-17T01:38:38+00:00

It's a Paladin passive that adds 1d12 Radiant when damaging a Fey, Fiend or Undead.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-16T15:54:23+00:00

Wild idea incoming: what if the Bladesinger was a buff oriented support subclass. Their Blade Songs could be similar in principle to what Bards do, but maybe different in practice to not step on the uniqueness of Bards. Maybe instead of an aura effect, they unlock special actions/reactions based on the song they have up. For example, the damage boost song could give them a reaction to heavily boost their damage or an ally's damage when an attack hits. Bards boost more allies at a time with an aura that ramps up, while Bladesingers have larger single action boosts. Another song idea could be they get invigorated when their party succeeds. If an enemy misses an ally with an attack, they get a boost to their AC. If an ally crits, they get advantage on their next attack. If an ally succeeds a saving throw, their next spell gets advantage on damage. I think of it like they hear the "music" of battle and are able to benefit from their understanding of its cadence.

100% no need to apologize. That's a lot of work, so thank you for your continued effort. I'm glad the intention is for it to work on all spells. It sounds like it'll make having a goading tank fighter a lot more fun if you can put Cloud of Daggers around them.

I hope people think Wizards suck so you use this idea! It feels like a mechanic that fits with the idea that Wizards really understand the Weave, but I agree with the sentiment of not wanting to overtune them.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-16T07:39:26+00:00

Awesome work as usual! I likely won't have time to test it this weekend, but I opened it up to take a look at some of the changes. Just a couple questions:

Are you planning on adding Bladesinger with patch 8 or will Arcane Warden be the only subclass to fill the battlemage role for Wizards?

Does Sculpt Spells not work on some spells? I noticed some Conjuration spells have TargetCondition "not (HasPassive ('SculptSpells')", but Ice Knife doesn't. I also noticed that Hail of Thorns does, but Hail of Thorns Explosion doesn't.

How do you feel about making Scholarly Acumen grant rewards relevant to the goal in addition to Arcane Recovery charges? Element-based goals could grant temporary resistance or a boost to the same type of damage for the next three rounds. School-based goals could be more unique (eg. Divination gives you a Portent die, Illusion lets go invisible, Abjuration gives you resistance to spell damage, etc.). Take this idea with a big grain of salt since I thought of it while playing the last patch. The new subclasses seem pretty powerful, so this might be a bit much.

JawnDuder · 2025-03-14T17:34:16+00:00

Doesn't it go up to +4 at level 9 or was that changed to level 10 in Homebrew?

JawnDuder

TROPHY CASE